– gold glittered on the trees, And the grass glimmered and breathed, As the first snow of autumn melted away. “What a beautiful day,” some may say. The sky was a white ceiling, And my room was ever so freezing, My body creaked and ached, I was so young yet felt so old, And alone. I wished I could reminisce with; Old friends, about days of past, About the vast; Expectations we had for our last; days. And my children and grandchildren, Would visit and ask about, My memories and the skills I knew, But I have no children, no friends; To remember with, And I am still new, And not yet old. I am still young, and cold, during our first fall snow.

"Remember that consciousness is power. Consciousness is education and knowledge. Consciousness is becoming aware. It is the perfect vehicle for students. Consciousness-raising is pertinent for power, and be sure that power will not be abusively used, but used for building trust and goodwill domestically and internationally. Tomorrow's world is yours to build." - Yuri Kochiyama When I entered high school, we were in the midst of the 2016 election. My peers and I were growing into our political selves, and we were rapidly forming opinions and being prompted by each other, unknowingly or not, to share them. The approach I had taken to discussions was, "why do you think that?" At times this was an incessantly infuriating question for others, but often, it was an opportunity to review the logic behind one's ideas. I believe that if someone's reasoning was sound and factual, there could be something for me to learn, and if it were not, there would be something for them to know too. I now understand that how I was operating has a name in philosophy, deductive reasoning. As I grew older and started reflecting more on how to be active in politics, I had to start understanding the world we live in instead of just discussing it with my friends. How can I know the solution to advocate for if I don't quite know why all these bad things are happening? And so, my desire to understand moved beyond simply understanding my friends' positions and mental health issues and psychology, to the world we live in and its systems. As a result, I became interested in sociology and philosophy. People often think psychology and sociology are opposites, the former about individuals, and the latter about society, with a hard line between them, two completely different ways to think about human action! Yet psychology is incredibly political, and mental health is intrinsically intertwined with sociology. I must be conscious of my future patient's needs. I must be mindful of the up-and-coming research. I must be aware of flaws and institutional influences in science. I must be conscious of the inner workings of the minds of others and my responses to them. When we are unconscious and unmindful, we lose sight of what we are doing. We lose sight of the meaning of our actions, and then we may do things that do not benefit ourselves or others. We need to be conscious of the establishment and resist where it is unjust, and this is so true in science, especially when it comes to lobbying groups and outside influences. We must make sure that science is used for good. Tomorrow's world is ours to build, but it is a great responsibility. It is an overwhelming, almost terrifying, responsibility. We must start by being conscious of ourselves. Higher education prepares us to think deeply about the world. We learn how to engage with the thoughts of those we disagree with. How can we be aware of what we are ignorant about if we are unaware of the ignorance itself? Because of how higher education is organized, we manage to learn things we didn't know that we didn't know. Higher education connects us with people who have traversed journeys with themselves and academia, and it helps prevent us from attempting to reinvent the wheel. Education is more than mere facts and knowledge; but consists of wisdom and mentorship that shapes us into more mature and well-rounded people, better prepared to face the real world.

Can you be mentally healthy while experiencing a mental illness? I have lived with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since I was thirteen. When I was about fourteen years old, I discovered an Instagram account of a woman with OCD speaking about her experiences. At that moment, everything clicked for me, and I finally understood what I was experiencing. I discovered that there were treatments for OCD and that people with OCD could live fulfilling and meaningful lives. Learning about my struggles led me down my academic path in psychology and becoming a mental healthcare service user. After being in therapy for about two years and receiving three misdiagnoses at seventeen, I finally received an OCD diagnosis at age nineteen. What I knew for years was finally acknowledged. Despite my struggles in the mental healthcare system, I was lucky; on average, it takes people fourteen to seventeen years to get diagnosed with OCD, and it only took me about six. As I sat across my computer screen, the woman who had completed my psychological evaluation explained, "OCD is a lifelong disorder, its symptoms might improve on occasion, but they can easily come back." Upon hearing this, I thought to myself, "Would I ever get to have a normal life? Would I ever get to worry about normal things like everyone else my age?" I wanted to worry about my grades, getting my driver's license, and if my headscarf looked nice. Instead, I got to worry about how well I washed my hands and if I lied "on accident" when I said I wanted to go shopping. I repeated movements and tasks again and again, and I lost hours of my day laying on the floor, trying to figure out if I'd make everything dirty because maybe, somehow, my hands were super duper dirty. There have been many times I've felt like giving up. There have been times when my mother woke me in the morning, and I immediately started to cry. There have also been times when I made the lives of others difficult by asking too many reassurance-seeking questions. Yet, despite my struggles, something that has inspired me to overcome them is the hope that things will get better. My journey into psychology through reading the stories of others with mental illness helps me do that. Having life goals, anticipating future life events, and having enjoyable moments with my loved ones all give me hope that things are getting better and will continue improving. Unfortunately, I sometimes still fall into a sense of paralysis, frozen by my overwhelming thoughts. I sometimes still have thoughts telling me that things won't get better. Yet, at the same time, I have my peaks of happiness and freedom from my illness, as well as a growing knowledge that my mental health will continue to improve, even if my OCD does not disappear from my life.

Do you know what "Ikigai" is? You may be familiar with the image of four overlapping circles, meeting in the middle to illuminate the admirable and elusive center of "purpose." I filled out an Ikigai chart in the first semester of college. The chart was printed onto one of the early pages of a planner I had purchased from the university bookstore. Each circle was labeled with one word or phrase, these words and phrases being "passion," "what the world needs," "learned skills," and "talents." First, of course, I had to define what passion meant, and I scribbled shoddy cursive along the curve of the passion circle, "What does passion mean? Rawness, something you love." Retrospectively, it's a little funny that I was satisfied with this answer because "love" is a concept that is terribly in need of definition itself. Still, I was satisfied, and I got on to writing my passion. My other categories, such as talents and learned skills, had multi-word, multi-line answers. Passions merely had one word. In big cursive letters, I had written the word "Understanding." "Understanding" was a perfect word for someone studying psychology like me. It is such a therapist-y thing to say, "I am passionate about understanding." Yet, it's deeper than that. Seeking to understand things has punctuated almost every breath of my life since middle school. I don't know what I was doing before then. When I was entering high school, the 2016 elections were happening. My peers and I were growing into our political selves. We were rapidly forming opinions and being prompted by each other, unknowingly or not, to share them. The approach I had taken to discussions was, "why do you think that?" At times this was an incessantly infuriating question for others, but often, it was an opportunity to review the logic behind one's ideas. I believe that if someone's reasoning was sound and factual, there could be something for me to learn, and if it were not, there would be something for them to know too. I now understand that how I was operating has a name in philosophy, deductive reasoning. As I grew older and started reflecting more on how to be active in politics, I had to start understanding the world we live in instead of just discussing it with my friends. How can I know the solution to advocate for if I don't quite know why all these bad things are happening? And so, my desire to understand moved beyond simply understanding my friends' positions and mental health issues and psychology, to the world we live in and its systems. As a result, I became interested in sociology and philosophy. I'm still a psychology major, although I am trying to figure out how to squeeze in a philosophy minor. I've studied sociology and love it, but I will reserve it for self-study. People often think psychology and sociology are opposites, the former about individuals, and the latter about society, with a hard line between them, two completely different ways to think about human action! Yet psychology is incredibly political, and mental health is intrinsically intertwined with sociology. When speaking to a professor about my aspirations for research, she had to explain to me, "Zuha, there is a lot of research out there on potential treatments and ways to help people. We just don't have the funding to do it." I immediately responded, "So psychologists have to be politically involved?" And she laughed and said, "I can tell you're systems minded." Systems are complicated and hard to examine. Systems are large and connect to everything, the most minute things in our lives. Before we ever understand what we should do next, we must understand what we are contending with.

I would so very much like to be content, though I doubt I'll reach 100% contentment in this life-time. I may continue to feel that I'm not practicing my religion well enough. I may not be standing up for marginalized communities -- like my own -- enough or that I'm not doing enough for the environment. Nonetheless, I'd someday like to be more comfortable with how much I am trying. So what am I doing? I'm part of a Muslim girls youth group. I'm the Midwest region's lead. I want to be surrounded by like-minded individuals who want to be better Muslims, care about activism, and have different viewpoints. The organization, Young Muslims, is, in a way, my gateway to that. I've learned that being conscientious of people's previous experiences in religious spaces is incredibly important. There is a lot of racism in the Muslim community. Many Arabs are racist towards South Asians, and Africans, and African Americans. Many South Asians are racist towards Africans and African Americans. African Americans probably suffer the most in the Muslim community. Sometimes, these bad experiences can make us cautious or even uncomfortable in religious spaces because we create an association of those negative experiences with religion. My youth group's mission is to create a safe space for all Muslim girls; that requires being incredibly mindful that nobody else feels unwelcome and makes sure that everyone is learning to be an anti-racist. I hope someday that we will have eradicated the prejudice within our community. One of my favorite memories from performing community service was one of the halaqahs, or study circles, we had had at my house. I had informed one of my peers that the activity we'd be doing after the educational portion of our gathering would consist of some writing. The information triggered her to start lamenting about how much her hands hurt after a day's worth of note writing, so I informed her that she didn't have to write if she didn't want to. When we finally got to the activity, though, a self-love and self-exploration exercise, everyone was enthused and involved, particularly the peer mentioned earlier. I would start telling everybody, "Okay, you have *insert number* seconds left to finish writing a response to the prompt," and she would go, "Wait! Wait! Just thirty more seconds!" It was fantastic to see someone who felt like they wouldn't enjoy participating in the activity ask for more time to do precisely that.

My favorite film is The Florida Project. It's an art-house film, released in 2018. Art-house films by nature are more serious and artistically oriented than films made for general entertainment, which probably contributes to why I like The Florida Project so much. The film follows Moonee, a young girl living in a motel with her mother in Florida. It's filmed from the children's perspective; the camera shots are low, the adult conversations and interactions are often hidden behind a wall of mystery, more inaccessible to children. The location is beautiful; the motel is a beautiful pink, the film is littered with beautifully aesthetic shots of buildings, skies, and the other regular fixtures of a child's life. The film is slow-paced, letting you live, breathe, and enjoy life with Moonee the way a child does. The film is not a rapid succession of conflict-filled events, yet, at the same time, it's telling a story, an unfortunate one of that. Moonee's mother is a single mother, struggling to get by, to get a job. As the movie creeps closer and closer to the end, we see Moonee's world start to unravel. I'd say what happens, but I don't want to spoil the film for whoever may read my essay. The Florida Project highlights the natural beauty of childhood and quietly shows you the terrors that can come with it. It shows you the joy and resilience of children while at the same time telling you an all too common story of childhood poverty. It peels back the soft skin of poverty in America to give you a glimpse into the lives of those who hide in sight. I love the film because, well, it holds the wonder of childhood and the pain of poverty in one hand, and that is powerful.